The program "has arranged 155 kidney transplants since its beginning on October 27, 2010. Several more transplants are scheduled to take place over the next several weeks."

That reflects a growing rate of transplants through the UNOS program, which has not yet achieved the volume of other programs, and now accounts for just over 4% of the 3,648 "Paired donation" transplants recorded by the OPTN database. (I'm not sure if those data capture all the kidney exchange chains.) The majority of kidney exchange transplants in the U.S. are accomplished through the other multi-hospital kidney exchange networks (NKR and APD), and, increasingly, through exchanges conducted internally by active transplant centers.

Friday, October 30, 2015

Here's a video of my recent talk at the WZB in Berlin.
Dorothea Kubler introduces me.
My talk goes to 55:15 minutes, and then there is a discussion by Stephan Gosepath, followed by my brief reply and then a general discussion with the audience.

At around minute 44 I talk for almost ten minutes about the exciting experimental work of Sandro Ambuehl (here it's a little too bad that the video doesn't include my slides, but you can get the idea). He's on the market this year (you could hire him), and his job market paper reports experiments designed to investigate the intuition, widely held by non-economists, that high payments may constitute "undue inducements" that can potentially harm the recipient.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Yesterday's post about paying for blood plasma in Canada reminded me of this story that The Guardian ran earlier in the year:Blood money: is it wrong to pay donors?"In some countries, people get paid for giving blood. And in the UK, we have to buy in plasma. But is safety compromised when money changes hands?"

Then there are the differences. Donors sit upright on uncomfortable, hard chairs. Some have just come off night shift; others have no money for food. Staff are concerned about how many units will test positive for blood-borne viruses. Potential donors worry about being accepted. A woman without an up-to-date residency certificate is turned away. A man insists he should be allowed to donate; he is broke and desperate for the 850 roubles (£8.85) payment. It is clear that most donors come for the money: for some, it is a lifeline.

"Nevertheless, thousands of NHS patients receive blood plasma from paid donors. This contains clotting factors and antibodies. Thousands of individual donations go into each dose of clotting factors – used to treat haemophiliacs who are bleeding – or immunoglobulins (antibodies) used to treat people with autoimmune diseases, severely damaged immune systems, or some serious infections.

After the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), known as mad cow disease, some recipients of UK plasma products developed the fatal brain disease variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob-disease (vCJD). As there is as yet no adequate screening test for this, British plasma has not been used since 2002, when we began to import it from the US."

"Many people think blood is special in a way that means it shouldn't be "commodified," or bought and sold on a market. It is a basic human need. It's not like the latest gadget or a pair of shoes; it is to be revered, not remunerated.

"I'm glad we don't think food is special in this way. If we did, imagine how many people would die of starvation, or would suffer from hunger.

This past December, the Ontario legislature preserved the sanctity of the exchange of blood through Bill 21, entitled the "Safeguarding Health Care Integrity Act." Schedule 1 included provisions from Bill 178, the Voluntary Blood Donations Act", which prohibits paying and receiving payment for blood, either directly or indirectly. With this bill, the legislature has made the giving and receiving of blood a sacrament.

*************

Of course Canadians don't have to pay other Canadians for blood plasma. If you look at the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) administered by the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), you find that HTS number 3002100210 stands for Human Blood Plasma, and in 2013 Canada had imports $29,274,584 worth from the U.S., where of course we compensate plasma donors.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

The Milken Institute Review, Fourth Quarter 2015, has published an excerpt--Chapter 4--of Who Gets What and Why. It comes with illustrations, which aren't in the original. The chapter is mostly about unraveling, and includes discussion of college football bowls, the market for law school graduates, and medical fellowships...and why Oklahomans are called "Sooners," and fraternity and sorority recruitment is called "rush."

"Alvin Roth, the author of this excerpt from Who Gets What – and Why,* won a Nobel in economics in 2012 for his work on the “the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.” I know, I know: that’s hardly an intro likely to induce you to dive right in. Most Nobels in economics, after all, are awarded for accomplishments that are too arcane for mere mortals to comprehend. And even the prize winners who do have something pressing to say to the public can rarely write their way out of that proverbial paper bag.

" But Roth and this book are spectacular exceptions. While he was really trained as a mathematician (his PhD is in a discipline called operations research), Roth’s vision has never strayed far from the practical. And he’s a natural-born writer to boot.

"Roth designs “matching markets,” where price alone can’t balance supply and demand – think of markets for everything from marriage to college admissions. Indeed, he’s even saved lives by helping to design an ingenious way to match more donated kidneys to needy patients.

"A national program that matches living kidney donors with recipients hasn't delivered on a promise after a woman donated a kidney to a stranger so her ailing son-in-law could get a much-needed transplant, the family says.

"Estella Jamieson agreed to donate one of her kidneys, only after being assured her son-in-law would soon get a transplant. She says she decided to contact Go Public because he is still waiting.

"I know I helped somebody and I'm glad that family is going good, but I just feel if I would have waited I could have helped my own family more," a teary Jamieson says.

"Jamieson gave her kidney to a stranger, so Pike could get one from another donor.

"We did our half. My mother-in-law has helped improve someone's life but the return of her doing that, is someone would in turn help me at the same time — not some time down the road when the stars align. I can't help but feel like there are options out there that could speed things up," Pike says.

"The surgeries were scheduled for February, but the day before Pike's procedure, he developed shingles and couldn't go through with the transplant. Jamieson donated a kidney anyway, on the promise her son-in-law would get a kidney when his health improved. Pike was medically cleared less than a month later but is still waiting.

"I was assured Jeff would be top priority if I went through with the surgery. It's seven months later and he still doesn't have a kidney. Even if he had date ... but there's no date, there's nothing," Jamieson says.

"While Pike waits, he can't work full-time and is physically weak. He also requires dialysis twice a day.

...

"Despite all that's happened, Estella Jamieson says she would still recommend the program to others, with one caveat.

"Don't get me wrong. I think it is a very good program and anyone with a loved one that wants to go into it, I'd say yes to go ahead. But make sure your loved one is getting a kidney when you give yours."

Sunday, October 25, 2015

The current newsletter of the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation has taken note of the early support that Ido Erev and I received from them, and I'm very happy to acknowledge it. I wonder how widespread are binational science foundations?

"Roth is a pioneer in the field of game theory and experimental economics and in their application to the design of new economic institutions. Early in his career, he and Prof. Ido Erev from the Technion received BSF funding on three different occasions for their work on how reinforcement learning can make useful predictions in experimental games."

They also quote me in an NPR interview, about kidney exchange, saying
“I kind of think of economists as being helpers here,” he said. “We have some ideas, but we don't do any of the surgeries.”
*************

Can sellers credibly signal their private information to reduce frictions in negotiations? Guided by a simple cheap-talk model, we posit that impatient sellers use round numbers to signal their willingness to cut prices in order to sell faster, and test its implications using millions of online bargaining interactions. Items listed at multiples of $100 receive oﬀers that are 5%–8% lower but that arrive 6–11 days sooner than listings at neighboring “precise” values, and are 3%–5% more likely to sell. Similar patterns in real estate transactions suggest that round-number signaling plays a broader role in negotiations.

We model an online display advertising environment with brand advertisers and better-informed performance advertisers, and seek an auction mechanism that is strategy-proof, anonymous and insulates brand advertisers from adverse selection. We find that the only such mechanism that is also false-name proof assigns the item to the highest bidding performance advertiser only when the ratio of the highest bid to the second highest bid is sufficiently large. For fat-tailed match-value distributions, this new mechanism captures most of the gains from good matching and improves match values substantially compared to the common practice of setting aside impressions in advance.

7:00 - late

Dinner at Area Four

Sunday, October 25

A rich theory literature predicts mixed pricing in various settings due to standard price discrimination, search frictions, and various other rationales. While typically interpreted as implying occasional sales or price dispersion, online marketplaces enable a firm to truly use randomization as a tool in pricing. We investigate a case of mixed pricing across a large subset of products on a major e-commerce website. We first test for randomizing behavior, before constructing a model of price discrimination that would generate such behavior as optimizing behavior. We estimate the model and use it to assess pricing effects of a proposed merger in the industry.

10:00 - 10:15

Coffee Break

10:15 - 11:15

“Real Time Pricing and Labor Supply in the Sharing Economy" by Chris Nosko, discussed by Ricardo Perez-Truglia

The degree and scope of criminal justice surveillance increased dramatically in the United States over the past four decades. Recent qualitative research suggests the rise in surveillance may be met with a concomitant increase in efforts to evade it. To date, however, there has been no quantitative empirical test of this theory. In this article, I introduce the concept of “system avoidance,” whereby individuals who have had contact with the criminal justice system avoid surveilling institutions that keep formal records. Using data from Add Health (n = 15,170) and the NLSY97 (n = 8,894), I find that individuals who have been stopped by police, arrested, convicted, or incarcerated are less likely to interact with surveilling institutions, including medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions, than their counterparts who have not had criminal justice contact. By contrast, individuals with criminal justice contact are no less likely to participate in civic or religious institutions. Because criminal justice contact is disproportionately distributed, this study suggests system avoidance is a potential mechanism through which the criminal justice system contributes to social stratification: it severs an already marginalized subpopulation from institutions that are pivotal to desistance from crime and their own integration into broader society.

Players have uncertainty over both an external random variable -- such as a security price -- and over each other's beliefs. We study agents' subjective expectations of the weighted average of others' subjective expectations...of the weighted average of others' subjective expectations of the external random variable. The weights involved can be viewed as a network. By relating these iterated average expectations to a Markov chain, we characterize their limit properties, generalizing prior results on games with common priors and complete-information network games. We then apply the conclusions to study coordination games, over-the-counter financial markets, the possibility of rationalizable trade, and the robustness of equilibrium.

Consumer auctions were very popular in the early days of internet commerce, but today online sellers mostly use posted prices. Data from eBay shows that compositional shifts in the items being sold, or the sellers offering these items, cannot account for this evolution. Instead, the returns to sellers using auctions have diminished. We develop a model to distinguish two hypotheses: a shift in buyer demand away from auctions, and general narrowing of seller margins that favors posted prices. Our estimates suggest that the former is more important. We also provide evidence on where auctions still are used, and on why some sellers may continue to use both auctions and posted prices.

ORGANIZERS: PHILIP J. RENY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
VIJAY KRISHNA, PENN STATE UNIVERSITY
Friday, October 23

"The University of Chicago Department of Economics and the Becker Friedman Institute are pleased to host the Conference Honoring Hugo Sonnenschein. This conference will bring together friends and colleagues to honor Hugo Sonnenschein’s scholarship, to celebrate his new status as “Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus,” and to recognize the exciting work in economic theory that is being carried out today.

Hugo Sonnenschein is an economic theorist whose most important scholarly work concerns the mathematical structure of market demand functions. His fundamental contributions on this topic, which he pioneered, have had a lasting effect on the field of general equilibrium, including the computation of equilibrium prices, and have greatly influenced and continue to influence the development of the theory of the household and of other group decision-making units. He has also made fundamental contributions to demand theory, social choice, imperfect competition, information economics, and game theory. Hugo's thesis supervision history is legendary in the profession. He has supervised the theses of many of the most prominent economic theorists of our generation, thereby ensuring the continued application of mathematical rigor to problems of importance in economics for years to come.

In 2009, he shared the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Laureate in Economics, Finance and Management with Andreu Mas-Colell “for extending the reach and applicability of general equilibrium analysis and for establishing the modern theory of aggregate demand.” Hugo’s recognitions also include Member, National Academy of Sciences, 1990; President, Econometric Society, 1989; Editor, Econometrica, 1977-1984; Distinguished Fellow, American Economic Association, 2005."

Shuchi Chawla, University of Wisconsin
Jason Hartline, Northwestern University
Denis Nekipelov, University of VirginiaMechanism Design for Data Science

12:30 PM

Lunch

2:00 PM

John Hatfield, University of Texas at Austin
Scott Duke Kominers, Harvard UniversityAlexandruNichifor, University of St Andrews
Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University and NBER
Alexander Westkamp, University of BonnFull Substitutability

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

"In a federal lawsuit, a group of women are challenging industry guidelines that say it is “inappropriate” to pay a woman more than $10,000 for her eggs. The women say the $10,000 limit amounts to illegal price-fixing, and point out that there is no price restriction on the sale of human sperm. A federal judge has certified the claim as a class action, which will most likely go to trial next year.
...
"While many other countries limit egg donation and the compensation that is allowed, egg donation is essentially unregulated in the United States. But in 2000,the American Society for Reproductive Medicineestablished the guidelines for how much women should be paid. They say that compensation over $5,000 requires “justification,” and that more than $10,000 is “beyond what is appropriate.” The amounts have never been adjusted.

The society argues that capping the price ensures that low-income young women are not drawn to donate by a huge payout without considering how it may affect their lives.

“If the compensation became too high, there is a concern that it might be incentive for donors to lie about their medical history,” said Tripp Monts, a lawyer representing the society. “And it could induce young women to donate without thinking too far down the road.”

Monday, October 19, 2015

UBS has commissioned a series of interviews about Nobel laureates. A film crew spent two days at Stanford interviewing me, my wife Emilie, and some of my students and colleagues (Mike Ostrovsky, Muriel Niederle, Sandro Ambuehl, Paul Milgrom), and they then conducted some interviews elsewhere also (of Tim Harford and Paul Donovan). You can see a collection of resulting videos at their site here: